Injury risk perceptions: How environments & childhood characteristics influence action

Injury prevention is key to any children's health promotion model, and tools for avoidance of childhood injuries are essential components of health professionals' anticipatory guidance to parents. Very little research has investigated the importance of relationships of children's perceived level of risk with key individual character traits, and influences of certain environmental contexts in an attempt to identify areas of increased harm and potential injury. This research addresses this void, and was part of a larger children's risk perceptions study utilizing a measurement tool developed by the researcher. The instrument assessed the levels of prevalence of different health/injury risks, identified the child's perceived levels of risk, and his/her perceived capacity to correctly identify the risk associated with certain activities, e.g. riding a bike or skateboard without a helmet. Finally, the tool also enabled the child's identification of individual character traits previously identified by prior research as either potentially protective or negative health risk behavior factors, the latter resulting in significant difficulties for children to avoid risks/injuries in their individual and social environments. Some strong and significant relationships found so far are shown between perceptions re: 1)how safe their schools are related to the safety of communities (0.33,p=.000); 2)clear family rules and parents' punishment for broken rules (0.41,p=.000); and 3)the ability to ‘think through' the good/bad of decisions and ability to avoid trouble(0.58, p= .000). Findings will be discussed related to their utilization in the development of future evidence-based childhood injury prevention.